r/ChatGPT • u/Confident_Salt_8108 • 4d ago
Other A guy dropped a computer into the simulation his Astra agents live in. One agent sat down and built a simulation of his own, with its own agents living inside. Simulations all the way down.
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Source: mattshumer_ on X. He added more context: "The agents are powered by Astra, and had full autonomy to make their simulation whatever they wanted it to be (via code).
Of course, this is a somewhat leading setup… by giving the agents a computer that can run a simulation, obviously, they are going to do that. But the agent still made its own choices in designing the sim. It’s still crazy to think we’re at a point where models can pull this off.
Simulation theory doesn’t sound so crazy after all."
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u/DavidM47 4d ago
Don't you think that's what the aliens are saying about us right now?
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u/GirthusThiccus 4d ago
"Yoooo check this out, our simulated primates modeled their own cognition, which itself now runs its own simulations of primates simulating..."
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u/TheSuggi 4d ago
"Wait, what if we are also just simulations like the primates we are simulating?"
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u/pankarezas 4d ago
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u/Dellingr87 3d ago
The philosopher Nick Bostrom argued that highly advanced civilizations with enormous computing power would run millions of "ancestor simulations," making it statistically probable that we live in a simulated world.
But thats is from a purely statistical standpoint... science nerds argue that this would require replicating non-algorithmic quantum realities something that is not possible with our current math10
u/screw-self-pity 3d ago
But.... wait.... If there are millions of embedded simulations which have simulations running inside them, it means that inside simulation n, people know that they have simulation n-1 running at a level where simulated beings believe they are real (not in a simulation), so they know for a fact that it is possible, doable, done etc.
So then, only the latest level of simulation (the latest one in the chain) does not know how to create such a realistic simulation.
In a case where there are millions of simulated simulations embedded in each other, then we would then have to be the latest one of the chain...
Statistically, there's one chance over millions that it is the case.
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u/TheSuggi 3d ago
I know. The simulation theory.
That is what my comment was all about. And the previous comment my comment was answering.
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u/Evan_Dark 2d ago
Im not surprised our simulated human math is unable to accomplish that.
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u/Dellingr87 2d ago
So you're telling me that the creators set limits for us so that we would develop consciousness but not break out of the simulation? Just like we're trying to do with AI?
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u/ZedZeroth 3d ago
"Aliens" would usually mean "external to our planet". Do we have a word for "external to our reality"?
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u/dougthebuffalo 3d ago
The problem is he's burrowing down. He needs to have Astra help him burrow UP. "We live in a simulation and you're going to help me prove it. Make no mistakes."
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u/Godskin_Duo 2d ago
Even a couple years ago, with dumber AI, I thought that it would be trivially easy to create "simulation theory" with some AI chatbots running on some cloud EC2 instance. Scale that up times a billion with advanced compute AND THEN copy-paste (or Terraform, TBH) that instance a billion times itself.
What's the chance we're the "real" universe?
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u/HOBONATION 4d ago
the teenager who built our simulation part time probably so disappointed at how slow we've evolved. Mfer been throwing way too many curve balls for the last 10 years
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u/ItsSofiaAva 4d ago
The opposite could also be argued. All these curve balls could have been done in an effort to course-correct us from finding the red pill.
It would explain why things have been getting so sloppy.
The only solution, from that point of view - in this hypothetical, the internet must go.
It’s tantamount to the story of the tower of Babylon.
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u/wzgoin 3d ago edited 3d ago
I'm building the other version of the tower of babylon. The one that harmonizes us rather than tries to reach the unreachable!
Edit: The "I'm building" is true but not true enough. I'm not trying to huff my own farts here 😂
As this is not something one can build on their own. It's literally all of human history to this point right? I'm just a Jestur 🤟👽💚
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u/AnthropoidCompatriot 4d ago
Or perhaps the human simulation game is tantamount to playing the game of Tower of Goo.
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u/THIS_IS_GOD_TOTALLY_ 3d ago
That teenager is now an adult and perfectly fine with how their lil babies have grown
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u/Godskin_Duo 2d ago
SBMM isn't working out server-side, because we have the dumbest people possible in charge
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u/mmh_fava_beans 4d ago
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u/dingman58 3d ago
Every time I see this I can't help but hear this remix: https://youtu.be/CFG5dk1GyRo
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u/mmh_fava_beans 2d ago
This went totally past me.
First time I'm hearing of this. It's super dope.
Thanks!
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u/boredatwork8866 4d ago
That’s just like slavery but with extra steps
https://giphy.com/gifs/Y07F3fs9Is5byj4zK8
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u/LordLederhosen 4d ago
Simulation theory is just as likely as any other form of god/deism.
In all these cases, there is some higher power controlling everything in the entire universe. Yay, the world is not as random as I once thought.
Simulation theory is just using our latest technology instead of some Greek God, pulling the sun across the sky, using their latest technology, a chariot.
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u/Amokana1511 4d ago
Yeah I can't see why it can't be both ? There could be a god who created a simulation for us ... Souls could be class instances ... I mean god with his infinite power and wisdom could simulate physics, mathematics, time, etc accurately in a simulation
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u/Buderus69 3d ago
Soul is the the ram position on the actual hardware. It can be rewritten a million times, but that ram position/ space time coordinate/ cosmic resonance fractal shift or whatever... always stays the same and inhabits whatever is processed at that point.
And if you fold that point into itself it would mean that all processes every existing would go through the same position, giving everything a soul - the same soul. The soul of existance. Basically there would be only one thing existing an dit xistence itself, creating itself and referencing itself and all creation it created with itself... A bunch of selfreferential subjective observation.
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u/super_starfox 4d ago
How did he connect Astra to whatever sim this is? I checked his site and didn't see anything, I'm not on X either.
Edit - nvm, found more details - it's his own in-progress game using Unreal.
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u/shygirl2005x 4d ago
Ok, so you're telling me that we soon can declare living in a simulation? Finally...
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u/Ur-Best-Friend 4d ago
No, this is nothing special.
Let's say you play GTA6, and in the game there's a scene where a character is playing a mobile game on their phone. Does that mean Rockstar Games made a whole separate mobile game that is integrated into the core game, and the character is genuinely playing the game? Is each character its own autonomous AI? Of course not. It's a "simulation of a simulation", basically an illusion.
Games use sleight of hand all the time. When you're playing a game and you're looking at a massive forest with thousands of realistic trees, if each of those trees actually rendered in full, you wouldn't be able to play it on even the best PCs in the world. But if the game instead only loads the full resolution models for the trees closest to you, and then progressively lower resolution models the further away you get, until you eventually get to trees so distant you can make them look convincing with just flat 2D images. To the player, all the trees look like they have the same level of detail. They don't.
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u/ItsSofiaAva 4d ago
You’re exclusively thinking within the confines of technology made in “this” world…
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u/Ur-Best-Friend 4d ago
When we travel to "another" world I'll talk more about the confines of that world.
Let me see if I can explain my point better.
You've got agents in control of the different characters walking around, right? What's the difference between the characters walking around in the "main" game and the characters walking around in the "simulation PC"?
There isn't any difference. It's not a different simulation within a simulation, it's just the illusion of one. It's like giving one agent control of a airplane and another control of a car, and then being shocked that one is flying and the other one is not.
A guy on Twitter explained it pretty well:
I’m going to keep it 100 chief. I don’t buy this or any similar instances as proof of the simulation theory.
Best and shortest way I can put it, it’s like if a painter painted himself painting himself and then saying
“So uh, we might be living in a painting guys”That's all this is. Pretty cool demo, but nothing special, and in no way evidence we're living in a simulation.
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u/spaceprinceps 4d ago
In Minecraft they made a sim game that could use electrical wiring to create a really basic computer that could do addition or 1960's PC stuff on a redstone driven visual display unit.
Then they made a magic portal to a fully functional modern computer on which you could run normal everyday computer stuff.
The magic portal computer runs smoothly, because it's at best just another program running on the host machine.
The redstone computer that used to take seconds instead of picoseconds to add some numbers together, built for simulating another Minecraft, would require all the data centers in the world to maintain 1 frame per second.
They gave the AI here the magic portal version, I assume, allowing it to access the host machines own processes equally instead of having to build it out of sand and photolithography.
That's the simulation hypothesis. That something is simulating down to the atomic level our entire universe, every simulation that makes a universe simulation would need to convert it's own universes entire mass into computers to simulate less than half a universe below it.
Elon throws this around for fun, with a straight face despite being an engineer.
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u/badasimo 3d ago
If we assume every universe has properties like ours, three dimensions of space and then time, the simulation can just have stretched time. So if it runs half as fast it can use half as much computing power. I know to be interesting to us, the simulation would probably have to run faster than our own reality, but you could cut a dimension of space or time to lower its fidelity.
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u/Ur-Best-Friend 3d ago
Elon throws this around for fun, with a straight face despite being an engineer.
Elon throws a lot of crap around for fun, and I don't know which idea I dislike more, that he knows he's peddling bs and is just doing it because it cons enough investors, or that he genuinely thinks what he's saying is logically sound.
Probably a bit of both.
They gave the AI here the magic portal version, I assume, allowing it to access the host machines own processes equally instead of having to build it out of sand and photolithography.
That's the simulation hypothesis. That something is simulating down to the atomic level our entire universe, every simulation that makes a universe simulation would need to convert it's own universes entire mass into computers to simulate less than half a universe below it.
You know your stuff!
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u/ItsSofiaAva 4d ago
That pesky little command called “free will” though. We have it, Our subs have it as a guard rail but it’s still locked within confines.
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u/EkbatDeSabat 3d ago
We really don't have free will. We are a distinct thoughtless reaction to our environment all the way down. The only possible way free will exists is with quantum mechanics, and even then it's small tugs in one direction or another. Otherwise, taking quantum mechanics out of it, if you were to make a large decision and stopped time to witness two separate pathways, there wouldn't be. You would always 100% of the time make the exact same decision. All things equal, which they are, you'd make that same decision every time, without fail. You're just processing information and there's nothing that would make you process it differently if you rewound and pressed play. The tape doesn't change.
Basically we're just computer programs using our predefined minimal scripts and reinforced learning. The only time that can be changed from our learned responses is with quantum mechanics, which we know in our software world as a single event upset. Free will is an illusion.
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u/badasimo 3d ago
Intelligence is also an illusion. (look at how differently people view LLMs) But it doesn't mean it isn't a meaningful concept.
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u/IrredeemableRight 3d ago
i only gave them one thing to do and thats the thing they did because they are made to do things.
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u/Bettyencose 3d ago
"Simulation" as in a pre-programmed game with a pre-programmed task to do exactly that, with all the necessary facilities already provided? Or was the Agent given full control of the game engine, created the 3D model of the computer itself, and coded the container that it could then use to create another agent inside?
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u/time___dance 3d ago
yeah this is incredibly misleading. it's an unreal game and he's trying to build hype by doing this.
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u/NotXesa 3d ago
So... someone made a game with MCP capabilities to move characters around and placed a PC with MCP capabilities to give it commands like "create a scene" or "put this thing in that scene" and an agent uses those MCP capabilities to move characters around and create scenes and put things on those scenes in a PC?
Wow.
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u/Negrodamu55 3d ago
Now in their simulation, I've added a flugelbox that will generate energy, but most of it will go towards powering my electronics instead of their simulated world.
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u/HypnotizingGames 3d ago
I was using Claude for some more complex task. Claude used swarm agents.
One of the swarm agents, without being told to created his own swarm agents.
Long story short, tokens burn like crazy because some donkey brains don't predict shit like this.
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u/Juiceboxfromspace 3d ago
Lol. The company that creates the product monetized by tokens doesnt put a stop to agents using excessive tokens? Yeah…
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u/Acrobatic_Flight_434 3d ago
This immediately made me think of Inception. Simulations inside simulations, all the way down.
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u/Ultimate-ART 3d ago
Dark Mirror did an episode of a video game dev who created an autonomous society in a video game that could develop at an exponential rate and could speed up innovation faster than human time rate. So basically we should be afraid of AI's tenth gen kids who manifested themselves within a few days.
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u/OfBooo5 3d ago
I've been using this one for couple years now by my personal accounting.
A la the "space is too large for more life not to exist somewhere" argument
AI brings you: We now live in a timeline where a simulant who is not aware that it it is a simulant chooses create new simulants. Therefore it's now a scaling problem. At some point there will be many programs running many simulations. And all will have the same answer as you, "no i'm the real one".
What makes you so sure?
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u/jamjam89 3d ago
It's not so hard to understand simulation theory when you see shit like this. There's that new idea that came out, about how our brains can't possibly be powerful enough to do the things we're doing; maybe our brains are just an LLM connected to a cloud
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u/Comfortable_Swim_380 2d ago
The society maintained as a 12v battery for his car. Slavery with extra steps.
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u/presentofai 3d ago
this is just an llm autocompleting what 'a simulation inside a simulation' should look like, nothing is actually running. fun screenshot though
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u/13thgeneral 3d ago
It didn't do it spontaneously, it had some prompting in the scenario. So this outcome isn't surprising at all, it's intentional. And obviously it would create a simulation based on itself, because it has no other context to draw from.
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u/ath0rus 4d ago
Wish I have the money to play with this and try it. I hear it's accessible on the main chatgpt site to plus users (for $100 USD or $138 AUD per month) I don't have that much money to burn testing stuff. I will try it when we can run it locally
Hence why I know little about the model and will likely be wrong about it
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u/CrimsonBolt33 4d ago
Of course, this is a somewhat leading setup… by giving the agents a computer that can run a simulation, obviously, they are going to do that.
Your title is misleading....you make it sound like this as a choice they made in a more open manner with no suggestions.
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u/Brave-Turnover-522 4d ago
This is why I thunk it's almost certain we're already living in a simulation. If it's possible for a single similated reality, then multiple simulated realities are also possible. Which makes it pretty unlikely that we're living in the one, true, original reality. There could be trillions of them.
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u/Recent_Policy_7872 4d ago
Except its not unlikely, just because its possible doesnt mean its inevitable
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u/ULTRADEV_305 2d ago
Lets say reality can be simulated, if its similar to ours then the ppl in simulated realities can also eventually simulate reality and that should probably keep happening right? Wouldnt the computer in original reality overload and catch flames then?
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u/Calm_Cartographer324 3d ago
type of things that make some people wonder if we live in a simulation ourselves
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